Hello Thomas,

Just to verify the official Support perspective, and as I suspect you may already know:

1. Development support of the ZMF 8.1.4 release ended on September 30th 2020.
2. ZMF-z/OS 2.5 compatibility requirements are documented here. 
3. Upgrading z/OS prior to ZMF would be a risky strategy, regardless of any other customer’s experiences.

To clarify point 3, the Support team will accept and investigate any issues or questions that may arise with ZMF 8.1.4 running on z/OS 2.5 from customers with an active maintenance contract. For example, by suggesting workarounds or by providing existing maintenance for the relevant patch level where it is already available. However, should we be unable to reproduce the behaviour you are seeing in such an unsupported environment, we would be very limited in the level of assistance we could provide. The issue will then need to be recreated on a supported version of the product running on a supported level of the operating system before it can be progressed.

Similarly, should you encounter a new problem then a fix will only be developed for the latest patch levels. Currently these are the ZMF 8.2 Patch 7 and ZMF 8.3 releases.

With all this in mind, we would strongly recommend that you upgrade ZMF to 8.2 Patch 7 or 8.3 prior to upgrading z/OS.

Best regards,

Steve